


a kind and gentle spirit

by thatdarkhairedgirl



Series: my feet will want to find you wherever you lie sleeping (but i will stay alive) [2]
Category: The Handmaid's Tale (TV)
Genre: Antisemitism, Canon-Typical Violence, Character Study, Gen, Jewish Identity
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-22
Updated: 2020-05-22
Packaged: 2021-03-02 20:15:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,908
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24302740
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thatdarkhairedgirl/pseuds/thatdarkhairedgirl
Summary: She prayed, just the once: Please, God, if you’re really up there, don’t let them find me.Dolores, and hiding in plain sight.
Series: my feet will want to find you wherever you lie sleeping (but i will stay alive) [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1639411
Comments: 5
Kudos: 25





	a kind and gentle spirit

> _“Think of all the beauty still left around you and be happy.”_
> 
> – Anne Frank, _The Diary of a Young Girl_

When she was growing up, Dolores and her sister played the Anne Frank Game.

She used to think that everyone did – hiding under the slats of the basement stairs, on the floor in the back of her mother’s walk-in closet, Dolores would eat peanut butter sandwiches as quietly as she could and would wonder, when the next Holocaust came, who would hide her? Which neighbor would take in her and her family? Whose attic would she hide in, whose basement, whose shed? When they came back for the Jews – and they always did, always, _always_ – which of her friends and teachers and acquaintances could she trust?

When she was a sophomore at Simmons, she got the answer, and it came in the form of being pushed into the back of a flatbed truck with a cattle prod, it came in the form of a red dress and a white bonnet.

No one. No one’s basement, no one’s attic. No one, no one at all.

**…**

At the Red Center, they sat her in the center of a circle of folding chairs and made her recount every rotten thing she’d ever done: _I stole my sister’s sweater, I broke my parents’ curfew, I drank five wine coolers and let the quarterback put his hands on me. I let myself get pregnant. I gave up my baby and ran away to college. I ran away from my responsibilities. I ran away. I ran away._

Aunt Elizabeth slapped her when she cried and Dolores felt the sting of it for hours, heard the echo of _her fault her fault her fault_ running on a loop in her head long after they dragged another girl into the center, even as she raised her right hand and said the same words, pointed the same accusatory finger. She stayed awake all night, after, lying on her back on her cot in the gymnasium, staring at the hockey championship banners they still hadn’t taken down from the ceiling and thought of the old adage, the one her mother and a single year of Hebrew school and nine viewings of _Schindler’s List_ had drilled into her brain: _an hour of life is still life_.

She prayed, just the once: _Please, God, if you’re really up there, don’t let them find me._

**…**

Commander Burke was always leaving his files and paperwork scattered over the breakfast table, his laptop open in plain view; there was a part of Dolores that wondered if he did it on purpose, trying to catch her or his wife or their Martha in the act of reading, trying to give himself an excuse to punish them for their sins. He held weekly conference calls with the generals at the front and she could hear him through the closed, heavy door of his study, that deep voice booming into the telephone receiver, winding down the halls of this fancy, stolen house.

Joan, the Martha, handed her a tea tray when their Commander called and Dolores carried it slowly from the kitchen and into the study, careful not to trip over the long hem of her skirt. He was on the phone when she entered and didn’t look up from his work until she was already setting down the tray on a nearby end table, reaching for his empty cup to refill it.

“It’s not like we lost anything important,” he said into the receiver, glancing up and motioning for her to pour in cream, two sugars. It felt a little like waitressing used to, back in the days before.

Dolores poured him a fresh cup of coffee and listened to her Commander’s half of the conversation: something to do with transport – a boat, maybe? Multiple boats? Something about tariffs and expenditures, getting stamps in visas, but it wasn’t until he said the word _Israelis_ that her ears actually pricked up.

“Do you actually think _anyone_ in the World Court will take those goddamn yids seriously?” he asked the man on the other end of the line, and Dolores came around to his side of the desk, set the mug down on the blotter. “It looks like an accident, faulty wiring or an engine issue. Nothing to… _no_ , Clark, Judd’s right – we did our part. They can’t put it back on us.”

Commander Burke caught hold of her as she turned to leave, hand warm over her hip through the fabric of her dress. He drew her down into his lap and Dolores let him; he rested his hand on her knee and she let him. He laughed at something he heard on the phone, _laughed_ , the sound a hoarse crackle in the back of his throat. “By the New Year?” he echoed, still laughing, “ _Right_ , right, _their_ New Year. I never could figure out why their holidays changed around so much.”

Commander Burke pulled her flush against his chest, steadied his knee between her parted legs, kissed her neck while he talked on the phone. Dolores kept herself still and blank, and watched as steam rose in wispy tendrils from the coffee cup, tried to memorize the shape and detail and color of objects placed on the desk. Burke slipped his free hand further underneath her dress and on the open laptop screen, the video clip still muted, still playing on a loop, she saw the footage of the _Exodus_ burning, and it took her a solid two minutes before she remembered to let herself breathe.

**…**

It went like this: her mom was Jewish, her dad a lapsed Catholic, and they gave up on organized religion altogether when her sister was twelve and Dolores was nine. Her last name let her pass, sometimes, and her Scots-Irish coloring – with that Aryan-blonde hair and button nose, who would have thought that WASPy little Dolly Sterling could even _possibly_ be _Jewish?_

It went like this: her college roommate brought her to a Christmas party and introduced her to her other friends as her oven-dodger bestie, and laughed the loudest of all of them when Dolores stammered and blushed.

It went like this: when she rode the orange line someone had graffitied _KILL ALL KIKES_ across the sliding doors of the train car, and the man sitting next to her looked at her and smiled like they were sharing a secret, like she was in on the joke.

It went like this: in the sixth grade a gang of bullies chased her Hasidic neighbors down on their bicycles and threw rocks at the girls walking back from the playground; in seventh grade her health teacher called pregnant Jewish women who fasted on high holidays _monsters_ ; in eighth, a little boy she babysat for kept asking where her horns were, if she’d gotten her forked tongue fixed and her tail surgically removed. He asked her if she was going to drink his blood.

It went like this: Dolores learned young and hard and ugly that it was easier to stay quiet, to blend in, to let them think she was blind or dumb or both, so long as they left her alone.

**…**

“Where do you go?” Oferic – _Brianna_ – asks, the two of them walking side by side and Dolores tips her head back enough that she can see the new leaves budding on the trees that line the streets, the little pink and white blossoms shedding a rainfall of petals in the breeze. The bright spring day is almost enough to let her forget the armed Guardians posted at the bridge, the Salvaging they’re walking towards. Everything is green again, everything is new.

“Go?” she repeats, and Brianna nods.

“In your head, during the – during the Ceremony. Janine says she thinks about music videos, June said she thinks about books she edited. I asked Alma, she said she thinks about sandwiches.”

Dolores stifles a laugh and under the curve of her white bonnet, she catches a glimpse of Brianna’s smile.

This is what she thinks of, when Commander Burke is huffing and puffing away on top of her, when his wife is digging her nails into Dolores’s wrists: she thinks of closets and basements and her old bedroom, the attic, the back of her parents’ car. Places she could hide in when she was younger, when she was small. She thinks of Shabbat, as a little kid, the handful of times they did it: her mother lighting candles, her sister covering her eyes. Her dad sitting with her in the kitchen, the two of them filling out her coloring book in the light of that yellow glow. She thinks of the _Shema_ , the only prayer she can remember, over and over and over again.

“I think about my family,” she tells her partner, but when she asks in kind Brianna doesn’t have an answer. Dolores taps her elbow to hers, once, the only comforting touch she can bring herself to risk.

**…**

Dolores is named for her grandmother, whom she never got to meet. As a child she would look at old photographs with her mother and loved the woman she saw there: singing in a sequined dress in a nightclub, with her grandfather in full vampire makeup for a party, grinning up at the camera above the lit candles of a birthday cake.

She was an adult, in all the photographs, bright and happy and alive. There were no photographs of her grandmother’s childhood. Dolores Czajka was fifteen when they took her out of Bergen-Belsen, sick with typhoid and down to a skeletal sixty-eight pounds. A British soldier carried her through the gates to the Red Cross station because she was too weak to walk; the first photograph of her in freedom was part of a Life photo spread, jagged at the edges where someone had torn it from the magazine.

“They left them behind,” her mother said when Dolores had asked about it, wondering if there was another album they hadn’t looked through, one that they’d missed. There were so many – dozens of them, filled to bursting, filling up the whole bottom shelf of the bookcase in the family room. “They could only take what they could carry, and when she went back to Lodz there was someone else living in her house.”

“In her _house?_ ”

“In her house,” her mother echoed, smoothing a hand over the open page in her lap. “They’d gotten rid of everything her family had left behind, and they threatened to call the police on her before they sent her on her way.”

“Why didn’t they help her?” she asked, “Why didn’t anyone _do something?_ ”

And her mother – God bless her, her mother only sighed and put the photographs away. “Oh, Dolly,” she said, and cupped Dolores’ face in her hand. “It’s never so black and white as we think.”

**…**

They hung a rabbi on the Wall today, his face black-bagged and a yellow star pinned to his chest, the torn fringe of his _tallit_ flecked with dried blood. Dolores walks past him with her head bowed and her heart hammering in her chest. She turns her face away and under the cover of her white wings, where her walking partner cannot see, she whispers six words in a language she is forbidden to speak. It is not the Mourner’s Kaddish, but it’s the only prayer she knows.

She thinks that he would understand.

**Author's Note:**

> Sometimes I think about the fact that my grandmother and Margot Frank were born fifteen days and two continents apart and it makes me want to cry.
> 
> Also, does my headcanon that Dolores is secretly Jewish come from that single line in 1x06 where she says _I think I went to a bat mitzvah here, once?_ *MAYBE_SO.gif*


End file.
